Set in the 1970s and '80s, The Hangman's House narrates the life
and times of a Hungarian family in Romania. Those were
extraordinary times of oppression, poverty and hopelessness, and
Andrea Tompa's latest novel depicts everyday life under the brutal
communist dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu, referred to by the
narrator as an unnamed "one-eared hangman." Ceausescu is
omnipresent throughout the story-in portraits in classrooms and
schoolbooks, in the empty food stores, in TV programs, in
obligatory Party demonstrations. Most insidiously, he is present in
the dreams and nightmares of common people, who, in this cruel
period of history, become cruel to one another, just like the
dictator. Our narrator, a teenage "Girl," observes life through
tangled, almost interminable sentences, trying to understand and
process the many questions in her life: why her family is falling
apart; why her mother has three jobs; why her father becomes an
alcoholic; why her grandmother dreams of "Hungarian times"; and,
most troubling, why there is persecution all around. Brutal though
the times are, Girl's narration is far from a mere indictment. It
is suffused with love, tenderness and irony. Written by a woman and
featuring a young woman narrator, The Hangman's House focuses
intently on how women play the principal roles in holding together
the resilient fabric of society. Evocative of the celebrated wry
humor that distinguishes the best of Hungarian literature, Tompa's
novel is a tour de force that will introduce a brilliant writer to
English-language readers.
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